Shaping the Stein collection’s Dunhuang corpus (2): the items from Cave 17’s ‘miscellaneous’ bundles

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In a previous blog post , we looked at the instrumental role played by Wang Yuanlu during the selection of the items from the Cave 17. Wang, who directly chose from the small repository what to hand over to Stein for inspection, was very keen to divert his attention from the so-called ‘regular’ bundles, which were composed for the most part of Buddhist sutras in Chinese and Tibetan. During their first ever transaction, which took place between 21 May and 6 June 1907, Wang Yuanlu therefore began by handing over the ‘miscellaneous’ bundles, which he seemed to hold in low estimation. To Stein’s delight, these contained mixed and diverse materials, such as manuscripts in non-Chinese languages, illustrated scrolls, paintings, drawings, ex-votos, textiles, etc. Stein picked out any of the items that jumped at him as being particularly interesting and made sure to put them aside for ‘further examination’, the phrase that he used to refer to their removal in his transaction with Wang. This
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@idp_uk on #MuseumWeek

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The staff of the International Dunhuang Project in the UK will take part in #MuseumWeek on Twitter from 24–30 March. Our aim is to give a behind-the-scenes perspective of working on a virtual museum to encourage people to work with us and the collections. If you would like to join in, please follow us @idp_uk.

The #MuseumWeek themes for each day are as follows:

Day 1 - A day in the life (#DayInTheLife)
Day 2 - Test your knowledge (#MuseumMastermind)
Day 3 - Your story (#MuseumMemories)
Day 4 - Buildings behind the art (#BehindTheArt)
Day 5 - Ask the expert (#AskTheCurator)
Day 6 - Museum selfies (#MuseumSelfies)
Day 7 - Constraint drives creativity (#GetCreative)

If you have a question that you'd like to #AskTheCurator, please go ahead and start tweeting your questions. IDP curators Susan Whitfield and Sam Van Schaik will do their best to answer on Day 5 (Friday 28).

To find out more about #MuseumWeek visit the Twitter blog.

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